What if your calendar looked like that on the day you upgraded your entire company to Oracle 12c? Do you think you could focus on back-to-back meetings, perform your database upgrade in a two-hour slot, duck out to happy hour at Mancini’s and fly to Cancún next morning on vacation?

Most sysadmins associate upgrade and migration projects with late nights, lost weekends, cold pizza and sentences that start with “Wait – that was supposed to . . .” Few in IT look forward to upgrading or migrating because of the potential for downtime. Every minute your database is down or unavailable is another minute when nobody can work on it. That costs money, adds pressure and introduces risk to what is already a stressful task.

What about migration testing? That too takes time and it can become the long pole in the tent, depending on how much you need and how comprehensive it is.

Then, to minimize the effects of downtime, companies usually schedule upgrades after hours. But in an era of follow-the-sun ecommerce, somebody somewhere is almost always inconvenienced.

Worst of all, migration and upgrade projects wreak havoc with system administrators’ free time. How many dinner dates must you cancel, how many of your kids’ baseball games must you miss before these projects get easier and you don’t dread upgrades?

Simplify your migration and upgrade projects – New e-book

With the theme of taking back your weekend, we’ve put together a new e-book called Simplify Your Migrations and Upgrades. Part 1 of the e-book is a primer on avoiding risk, downtime and long hours. With that Oracle 12c project staring you in the face, you may find that the e-book addresses most of the basic questions around upgrade and migration projects:

What’s the difference between migration and upgrade?

Why migrate or upgrade?

When is the best time to migrate?

What are the top 5 reasons migration projects fail?

How can you reduce risk during your migration or upgrade?

Have a look at the e-book and stay tuned for more posts in this series on performing your migrations and upgrades while taking back your weekends and free time.